While on holidays, I've been following the discussion in mainstream and social media about the closure of Vancouver's Wilcox Group and what relevance, if any, it has to the PR industry. I've had time to sit back and reflect on what's being said, decide whether I agree with it or not, and how much of it I even believe. We are, after all, in the PR business.

From my POV, everything Mat says is true...for Mat. And none of it is true for me, or at least the way it is being characterized. Social media being the game changer doesn't reflect my own experience.

If the lead on Mat's story had been, "We're too small and too local to be able to respond to crises for our clients given the global nature of the way information is shared and the speed with which it travels," I would have said -- I can see that. Because in my view, the real game changer isn't social media, it's size. Simply put, these days in PR, size matters -- and it particularly matters when it comes to crisis response.

The PR industry has been going the way of other professional services. I'm old enough to remember when the big five accounting firms were more like the big 15, and when architectural  firms were boutique shops and not the size of Stantec.

But global clients require global response and today, all of our clients, even those based locally, are global. Certainly, the use of social media tools has accelerated the process because we live in a world in which a single tweet can be heard around the globe -- and what begins in the social media space is quickly amplified by mainstream media -- which still has significant reach and clout.

As Mat said in her blog and as part of the BC Business magazine article, in a crisis, the team needs to be able to expand and contract. I see the only realistic way for this to happen is to be  part of a national or global firm with access to resources beyond your geography; or be part of a strategic partnership of like-minded and resourced firms; or a merger among smaller firms into a larger one; or close the shop and hang out a shingle as a consultant who can advise, but not respond or implement.

This doesn't mean that smaller shops won't be able to thrive. They have in the past, they will in the future.I think they'll find a niche and fill it well. Local clients. Project-based work. Specialty offerings. But what they won't be able to do is support national and global clients in a crisis that may require 20 people one day and two the next.

The timing of the acquisition of a majority interest in Karyo Communications by Edelman was no accident. We had recognized that Karyo was as large as we were going to get in the Vancouver market, but not large enough to develop our own intellectual property or stay as current as we needed to with changes going on in the industry and marketplace.

We didn't have access to national and global brands that needed people on the ground in markets beyond Vancouver. We recognized that the trend was going towards "Go big or become very small," because mid-size was going to be exceedingly challenging to maintain.

What began as a strategic partnership with Edelman around BC's participation in the Torino Olympics, ended in our being acquired. Our strategy was to go big, and fortunately for our firm, it has paid off.

Today, our Vancouver staff of 35 are the beneficiaries of the more than $20 million Edelman has invested since 2005 in social media R&D, IP development, establishment of standards and best practices, and financial modeling to make sure social media and digital programs are profitable -- including a series of courses leading up to a Black Belt in social media.

Yes, we've been able to monetize social media in a real and tangible way and grow our overall revenues accordingly. And no, we likely wouldn't have been able to do this without access to the thought leadership provided by a team of people within Edelman who spend all of their waking hours pushing our company forward to become leaders in the digital space. Again, we can do this because of our size.

We have the advantage of being able to scale up or down to match the clients' needs -- and that's due entirely to our size. We may be 35 locally, but we have access to 3300 more across the globe. In fact, one of the first crises we responded to as part of Edelman wasn't for a local client, but for a client serviced by our LA office -- because in addition to the expertise, we had the capacity, were in the right time zone, and more than likely, because we were willing to file the first report at 3:30 in the morning.

We monitored the online conversation using tools like Radian6 and others, in real time, and helped to shape the crisis response and predict where the story was going to go. And when it came time to paying our invoice, our client had no difficulty understanding the value of our work.

If anything, social media tools have brought in new revenue for our office and our company -- and the revenue hasn't come at the expense of PR budgets. We've taken some of it away from advertising, and some from marketing. We've reframed our services to take advantage of what social media offers clients -- the ability to directly and truly engage with their customers and stakeholders, no longer needing to go though information gatekeepers to do so -- which just might be the best form of crisis preparedness there is.

Everything I am saying is true...for me. Just as what Mat said was true for her. And we're telling very different stories.

Despite my 27 years in the biz and Mat's 15; despite variously being named Queen, Maven and Doyen of PR -- neither one of us can or should take our individual experience and extrapolate it to the industry -- because we would lose credibility in the process. But we can, with certainty and legitimacy, speak to our own experience, as long as we remember it is exactly that.